NTC 05: Muesli
Hey, It’s Pete Hindle with issue five of the No Talent Club, an email newsletter about how you don’t need talent to cook. This week: muesli, a food that nobody needs talent to cook, because it’s a cereal.
Muesli is a meal for one. It would be weird to invite your friends over for muesli. Muesli, for me, is the dish that you sometimes have a breakfast, but most often have later in the day because you don’t want to prepare a real meal. Or maybe before bed, because it’s easy.
I have some health issues, and sometimes I get tired. It’s hard for me to talk about it, both generally and specifically. Tired isn’t really the right word, I’m… beyond tired. Worn out. A general loss of control of my body. I also refuse to explain it too much, because if you know, you know. If you’re reading this, and thinking ‘oh, you’re tired? Just go to sleep?’ then you haven’t understood what the problem is.
But, on those days that I’m too tired to do much else, I reach for the muesli. For the longest time I brought my own muesli, because it’s easy, but I have started making my own, which is also easy.
Ingredients
• oats
• sultanas
• anything else you want - dried fruit, nuts, etc
Instructions:
There are two ways to do this: the lazy way and the easy way.
The lazy way is that you put all the things you want in your muesli into a big jar and shake it up. As well as oats and sultanas, I often put a pinch of cinnamon into the jar, some dried cranberries, and maybe some nuts. The shops here sell a nut mix called ‘studentenfutter’ (student feed) which is basically trail mix, and if we have the end of one of these lying around I throw it into the jar.
The easy way of doing this involves toasting the oats. You put the oats in a frying pan, with no oil, and heat them little bit (while stirring!) until they are slightly toasted. You can do this for almost all nuts and grains, and it improves the taste of almost everything. The problem is that I often toast the oats too much and they end up with gritty black bits, which isn’t that fun.
There is no hard way of making muesli.
All the cereal you buy in the shop has extra things added to it so that it lasts longer. The weird dried fruit, the crunchy sugar granola bits, all have a level of processed food added to them. It’s not that I care that much, but like the studentenfutter, this is often sold as a ‘healthy’ alternative, when it’s not. The healthy alternative is making your own and adding some fruit (figs are in season now, and they taste great on muesli).
Next week: back to cakes. I have been given a huge amount of saffron (thank you Raja!) so I am working on perfecting a saffron custard tart. That’s means if you come near my house you have to eat saffron custard tart. Alternatively hit reply and tell me what you had for breakfast (I always want to know what people have for breakfast)
Pete
if only I had a magic ring to get out of cleaning up after cooking